The good news for Liverpool is that Lyon, their Champions League opponents tonight, lost on Saturday, going down 2-0 at Sochaux. The bad news is that it was their first reverse of the season, and the team against whom they must try to get their season back on track after three straight defeats is top of the French table, looking rejuvenated after a summer clear-out.

"Liverpool is always Liverpool," said Miralem Pjanic, Lyon's Bosnian playmaker, "and you always have to talk about that club with dignity and respect. But I think that this year they do not resemble the team from last season. Then they played harder and stronger. They seem to have big problems and I just hope they don't solve them in the game with us. We have a real chance."

The centre-forward Lisandro López and the left-back Aly Cissokho have both made a major impact since arriving from Porto – the latter having failed a medical at Milan because his teeth were too bad – Bafétimbi Gomis has added pace to complement López's guile and the Brazilian Michel Bastos has impressed on the left. But central to their improvement has been the emergence of the 19-year-old Pjanic as a viable replacement for Juninho Perambucano.

Taking the Brazilian's No8 shirt, he has replicated not merely his probing, intelligent style, but also his dead-ball delivery, whipping in fine goals from free-kicks against both Anderlecht and Debrecen already this season. "I've been taking them for a long time, practising every day," he said. "I am a midfielder and it is important for me to have that quality, too. I have to have the power to score from the free kicks. But I am aware that I have to learn more, to be more dangerous. My free kicks have to be a strength of my team, so that everybody who plays against us is scared when we take them."

Pjanic's journey to Lyon began in Bosnia when he was a matter of months old, and took him via Luxembourg, for whose Under-17 team he played, before committing to the land of his birth at senior level. His father, Fahrudin, was a footballer, playing in the Yugoslav third division for Drina Zvornik. Shortly before the war, he received an offer from a club in Luxembourg to play semi-professionally, working by day and training in the evenings.

"Today, people say that no one dreamed there would be the war in Bosnia," he said. "But for me it was quite clear what would happen in Yugoslavia. Playing third division games in small towns you saw everything and felt everything: hatred, violence, threats. I knew there would be riots and so I decided to leave."

Drina, though, were unwilling to let him go. Desperate, Pjanic's mother, Fatima, went to the club to beg them to hand over her husband's registration papers, the baby Miralem in her arms. "A child is a child," she said, "and when he felt that I was upset he started to cry. Only then did the secretary of the club give us the documents. I doubt that we would ever have got out of there if Miralem had been silent at that moment."

In Luxembourg, Fahrudin began to take his young son to training and matches. "The ball entered his blood," he said. "It went along with me and the rain and the sun. It was natural for him. When he was six or seven years old I realised what a talent he had, but I never believed that he could play for a club like Lyon."

It was shortly after the war when the family returned to Bosnia to visit friends and relatives that Fahrudin understood just how gifted his son was. He juggled a ball from foot to foot for the whole 12-hour journey there. "We arrived late at night, and at six in the morning my father woke me," said Fahrudin. "He said he could hear something banging in the garage, and that it was maybe a burglar. So we went down and we saw how Miralem played with a ball. I knew then he would be a player."

Initially he joined Metz, just over the border in France, and from the age of 12 he started receiving offers. "There was a youth tournament held over two days with four pitches," Fahrudin remembers. "But all the scouts watched only one pitch: everybody wanted to see Miralem play. PSV Eindhoven made an offer to us and since that day we kept getting faxes from clubs."

Pjanic stayed at Metz, leading them to the French youth championship at the age of 16, and became a first-team regular the following year. Barcelona, Internazionale, Schalke 04 and Bayern Munich all made approaches – "Felix Magath was very persistent," said Fatima – but Pjanic opted to stay in France and move to Lyon. "I went to Barcelona, the negotiations were very fair and they made us a specific offer," said Fahrudin. "But it was a turbulent time for the club after Rijkaard had left and I thought it wasn't smart for an 18-year-old to go to Barcelona at such a time."

Miralem has had no reason to regret the decision. "We're going great at this moment," he said. "We believe in ourselves, in our way of playing. Our togetherness is beautiful. We all have only one goal: to get back the title that we lost last season. We are well coordinated, we're playing well and we have a team that will play well the next two or three seasons. It's important that we have brought in young players: it's wise to invest in the future. This motivated us."

He is also motivated by the thought of playing against Steven Gerrard. "I can hardly wait for a showdown against him," he said. "He is a phenomenal player, one of the best and most complete in the world. It will be an honour to play against him." The way things have gone this season, it won't be long before Gerrard is saying that of him.